‘your voice as” - A two person exhibition speaks to the voice as expressed through the visual. In the photographic practices of artists Chloe Cusimano and Alison Chen, the body becomes voice—a porous site where interior states are made visual, and where self-hood is expressed not as fixed identity but as a layered, shifting presence. Working through self-portraiture and portraiture, both artists engage the image as a form of pictorial poetry, where what is seen moves powerfully toward what remains obscured or in flux.

Cusimano’s cyanotypes images are printed onto cotton fabric then are physically altered collages, quilted, woven—foregrounds the tactile experience of the self as something always being shaped and reshaped. The tension between abstraction and legibility mirrors the artist’s lived “negotiation of visibility”, particularly within queer theory and post-colonial contexts. Here, the photograph is not a document but a site of transformation, where disappearance and emergence happen simultaneously.

Similarly, Chen’s photographic work draws from the intimate terrain of motherhood, unfolding a portrait of radical transformation. Her images dwell in the liminal spaces between joy and sorrow, presence and invisibility, time and timelessness. The maternal body, as captured through Chen’s lens, becomes a metaphor for the temporal: both anchor and  ghost, body and voice. Her work speaks to the ways intimacy can both root us and unravel us.                                    

Together, Cusimano and Chen offer distinct yet intertwined approaches to the image as a kind of visual voicing. Their work touches on the impossibility of full representation—how bodies appear, recede, fragment, and re-form—and in doing so, they compel viewers to reflect on the palpable/impalpable nature of identity, and transformation.